Hi all,
I’m a newbie to 3d printing and received my printer like yesterday. It’s a Robox by Cel.
After calibrating like instructed this is the quality I got from highest quality setting.
The simple shapes look okay to me but have some irregularities I’m not sure with. The disc with a texture doesn’t look good at all.
The pyramid and the cube are 1cm per side, the disc has a diameter of 40mm
What’s your opinion and what settings I could play with to improve?
I do not know the printer you are using but with my Replicator 2, switching from Makerware to simplify 3D helped me a lot to improve results.
Unfortunately S3D is 140$ and there is no demo available. Believe me, it is worth the money.
That looks like a great software but they do not support (yet?) my printer (its pretty new - a kickstarter fullfilled right now).
It comes with its own software (AutoMaker).
I hope there is another way to improve quality without buying other software, but its good to know about that option.
My results were good with Makerware but they were really improved with no difficulties with S3D (I do not work for them 
)
I’d begin by levelling the bed and ensuring that the nozzle height is correct, because the first layers look to be squished out. While you’re at it, triple check the diameter of your filament and the feedrates as it also looks like there’s some degree of over extrusion happening here.
Also check your extrusion temps and cooling. Especially important for surface texture. What are your fill settings?
Try to use different slicer instead. Example Cura or Slic3r.
The pyramid looks like it’s overheating at the top which isn’t surprising as you get less time between layers. If you can, set a minimum layer time, use more fan or print something else at the same time so there’s some cooling between layers.
Better than what’s coming out of my Robox. I think they still have a lot of fine-tuning to do in their software, perhaps rushed to get something, anything out to their backers. I’ve shelved mine til at least the next update.
@Miles_Flavel
Perhaps that ‘squishing’ is deliberate, to help bed adhesion. If no trouble there, yes to alter the first layer settings.
These sorts of questions are really hard because there are so many variables, the main ones in this case are printer rigidity, firmware, and slicing.
Rigidity issues in the printer results in ‘wobbling’ which is to say that one layer put on top of the next is not in the same place. A good way to analyze that is with a very thin walled square box, and a cylinder. The box will show defects if the printer cannot change direction without shaking itself off axis. Rigidity problems result in artifacts along the vertical sides of your prints.
Firmware issues are where the system doesn’t compensate for a ‘small’ area and a ‘large’ area. The challenge of FDM printing is insuring the material is at the right temperature for fusing (both existing layers and new layers) and you really only have three ways to addresses that, a heated chamber, a scheduler algorithm on the print so that it keeps the time between layers consistent, or firmware that knows a short run needs to be a different (slightly lower) temperature than a long run. Your pyramid does seem to be showing a firmware issue in that the top does look over heated (using heat settings from the bottom on the top).
Finally there is “slicing” or converting from a 3D model into layers. The only thing I like about S3D was that it shows the slices really well. The printer can spend too much or too little time in a certain spot when slicing. So for example on the cube the bulge in the top looks like an artifact I generated once by having a slicer always start at the same point for doing the rim and changing from “infill” to “edge” extrusion rate (which boosted filament being pushed out) resulting in a ‘bump’ (not as large as yours) along the cube at that corner.
The ‘bonus’ issue is that poor filament can cause errors as well since it is needed to flow properly and consistently through the nozzle for good results. Depending on extruder design, either variations in diameter or variations in density can cause problems here. I got some filament samples from some vendors at MakerFaire that were hilariously bad, and one that was quite good. But they really showed the difference a bit of filament makes.
Thanks for the answers so far, this gives me a good direction what experiments I can make.
